Creating Adventures - Dungeon Master's Guide (2014)

Creating Adventures. Creating adventures is one of the greatest rewards of being a Dungeon Master. It's a way to express yourself, designing fantastic locations and encounters with monsters, traps, puzzles, and conflicts. When you design an adventure, you call the shots. You do things exactly the way you want to. Fundamentally, adventures are stories. An adventure shares many of the features of a novel, a movie, an issue of a comic, or an episode of a TV show. Comic series and serialized TV dramas are particularly good comparisons, because of the way individual adventures are limited in scope but blend together to create a larger narrative. If an adventure is a single issue or episode, a campaign is the series as a whole. Whether you're creating your own adventures or using published adventures, you'll find advice in this chapter to help you create a fun and memorable experience for your players. Creating an adventure involves blending scenes of exploration, social interaction, and combat into a unified whole that meets the needs of your players and your campaign. But it's more than that. The basic elements of good storytelling should guide you throughout this process, so your players experience the adventure as a story and not a disjointed series of encounters. Elements of a Great Adventure The best adventures have several things in common. A Credible Threat An adventure needs a threat worthy of the heroes' attention. The threat might be a single villain or monster, a villain with lackeys, an assortment of monsters, or an evil organization. Whatever their nature, the antagonists should have goals that the heroes can uncover and thwart. Familiar Tropes with Clever Twists It might seem stereotypical to build an adventure around dragons, orcs, and insane wizards in towers, but these are staples of fantasy storytelling. It might also seem trite to begin an adventure in a tavern, but that's an idea that remains true to D&D. Familiar story elements are fine, as long a...